[APPLAUSE]
Oh, look at you.
Whoa.
Look at you.
So nice to see you all.
Thank you, Tyler.
Thank you everyone at the Poetry Center for all the work
you do to make all of these things possible.
It's an honor to be able to introduce you tonight, Mark.
And I have to say, I kind of went through various scenarios
of how to do this in my head.
I thought I could just list off all the amazing awards
and things you've gotten-- the Guggenheim, the Stegner
Fellowship, two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center,
the National Endowment of the Arts,
but you could read that anywhere.
So then I thought, I could just say
you have the best hair in poetry,
which would entirely be true.
But maybe not necessarily visible to the folks
in back yet.
So I thought maybe I'd start just by reading,
I think, six lines from a poem.
I think it's recent.
"My Local Dead."
"I sometimes hear the call to return,
Come back to the shady valley with its reliable breeze,
The crumbling brindle bluffs, a brandy old fashioned made with
7UP,
Waiting for me on the sticky bar of the Golden Frog
Recognition registering with those I meet
When they see my father looking back from inside my aging face."
Even in those six little lines, we hear this percussive
alliteration-- return reliable, brindle brandy--
the slant rhyme of bluff and up, and the poignant acknowledgment
of the fact that we all, eventually,
turn into our parents in one way or another.
And I think that to offer one way to explain
all of that goodness packed in six lines,
I want to refer to a quote from one of Wunderlich's most
recent interviews.
I think it was recent, where he says very provocatively,
I'm interested in writing poems, not poetry.
And I think I want to linger on that point because, of course,
it can't be entirely true.
I mean, he's a director of Bennington writing seminars.
And if you've read any of his other work,
you know he knows his way around the world of poetry.
But at a moment when poets, like other workers,
feel an increased pressure to produce, in some of our cases,
to the rhythm of academic promotion and the tenure
calendar, for others, to the manic drums of a viral attention
economy, Wunderlich is writing to a kind of different beat.
He's writing on the clock of art driven
by both immediacy and timelessness.
And I take that as, I'm interested in writing poems, not
poetry as an interest in process.
And I also want to just note, I just
used the word timelessness, which I generally dislike a lot.
I often think it gets used as this orange construction
cone that asks us to detour away from the timeliness of our most
immediate concerns.
But Wunderlich's poems are anything but a detour.
They're knitted out of the materiality of the moment,
whether they're inspired by a found collection of German
immigrant house poems, as was his collection,
"The Earth Avails," or inspired by contemporary political
imperatives, as in the poem, "Don't Say Gay,"
in which he writes, quote--
"If you think our resolve is meek, we don't care.
We dare a life of beauty and of love,
of men napping naked on the couch in June
with all the windows open to the world,
fingers curled into a beloved's hair.
There is no end to this, which cannot be unspoken from
the air."
When the world feels like it is so much, too
much to witness and to bear, art can
become reactionary to the whims of capitalism,
to cultural mood swings, to Instagram influencers.
But Wunderlich's poems never do that because they always reveal
a poet more interested in quote, "writing poems than poetry,"
more entranced with the making.
And I'll end with this longer quote about process from Mark--
"I feel most alive when I'm working
on a poem, when all of my subjectivity, all
of my faculties, everything I've read,
my engagement with the language, the other languages I know,
and the world around me are leaning toward me
and wanting to be described.
All of this goes into the making of a poem."
Please join me in welcoming Mark Wunderlich.
[APPLAUSE]